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Tuesday, March 6, 2012

More Thoughts on Thinking

Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

Zhou Youguang's Take

In today's New York Times there is a remarkable profile of an incredible man. Zhou Youguang should be a household name in China. He is 106 years old. As a Chinese language learner, I have immense respect for this man, who invented Pinyin. According to the Times, "Mr. Zhou is the inventor of Pinyin, the Romanized spelling system that linked China’s ancient written language to the modern age and helped China all but stamp out illiteracy."

This is what he had to say about fostering creativity in the Communist system in a 2010 book of essays: “Inventions are flowers that grow out
of the soil of freedom. Innovation and invention don’t grow out of the
government’s orders.”

Responses to readers responses

Remember, my question was, "What do you think about how we think different [sic] than one another?"

Chris Nevins response was anthropological:

My short answer is yes and
no, but the 'no' is second intentionally. Yes, there are social and
cultural differences that account for meaningful differences among the
ways all sorts of differing groups think, let alone nationalistic ways.
But, no, we do not think differently in
more existential ways. There is a universal culture that trumps other
essential frameworks in ever so slight ways. 'Emic' versus 'etic,' and I
guess I come down on the 'etic' side, though if you ask me tomorrow I
might have a different answer.

Chris references something I don't know much about so I will simply provide the reader a bibliography--"emic" vs. "etic":

I think the question which
needs answering first is what you mean by "think." Are you speaking of
values, beliefs, hierarchy of principles inherent (for the Chinese, and
then conversely, for Americans)? Are you speaking of the actual steps in one's reasoning process, or of the rationale for those steps?
And then of course, there's the acknowledgement that there are
significant differences in the way those within a group will order their
values/beliefs/hierarchy of principles. Some of that reflects
subculture membership, and sometimes even with a control for those
subculture memberships, we will find that there are differing
values/priorities.... Although we are more likely to find agreement
about what the "general you" should be prioritizing/valuing (whether the
individuals would be making the same choice or not). The
"think differently" argument often made about the Chinese, is that they
prioritize the general good, rather than the individual good -
family/ancestral respect, rather than separate, individual
accomplishment, and that any individualization must be justified by the
benefits for the greater good of the group [family, region, country]
.... I'm not sure how much anthropological research has been done in the
area, I suspect very little peer-reviewed work since the revolution,
although work prior to then might be illuminating .... and of course,
the question would also be how that has been changed by generations of
communist rule. [/anthrogeek rambling]